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Europe’s intellectuals need to quit playing the ‘identity game’

JURGEN Habermas is Germany’s premier public philosopher. A long-standing friend of Joschka Fischer, the country’s foreign minister, he has been the single most important voice in the interminable conflicts about German identity. Now, with a little help from his European friends, he has tried to launch a debate about the ‘rebirth of Europe’ in the wake of the war in Iraq.

Together with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, he wrote a manifesto published simultaneously in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and France’s Libération newspapers.

On the same day, Umberto Eco and Gianni Vattimo joined the initiative by writing in Italian journals, while Adolf Muschg and Fernando Savater mused on ‘European identity’ in Switzerland and Spain respectively.

Apparently, not a single European intellectual could be found in Britain at the time…

But how, then, has Europe been reborn? According to its leading intellectuals, it happened on 15 February, when millions marched on the streets in Rome, Madrid, Paris, Berlin and London against the war in Iraq.

This, according to Habermas, was the moment when a common European consciousness came into focus. Never mind that millions more marched elsewhere around the globe…

Within this new ‘Eurocentrism’, there is something about European mentalities, formed through often painful historical memories, that predetermines that they should play the role of a ‘civilizing’ counterpart to the United States.

Apparently there is also something special about the history of European conflicts that has given the continent’s population a peculiar capacity for recognizing – and accepting – differences.

It supposedly helps that secularization has gone further here than in any other region of the world – and that Europeans still trust the agent of that process of secularization, the state, more than Americans.

Finally, Europeans, according to Habermas and Robert Kagan, are indeed more sensitive: against the background of the experience of totalitarianism and the Holocaust, they are said to have developed a stronger sense of threats to personal and even bodily integrity.

There is something terribly contrived about this public search for forms of European commonality.

It produces counter-examples more quickly than the sense of solidarity it is supposed to achieve among its audience.

Also, as many critics have pointed out since the publication of the manifesto, it is essentially a good old German Social Democratic consensus that is being projected onto the continent as a whole.

Where efforts failed at the national level, all good things in life – from the welfare state to lively constitutional debates – are expected from Europe.

More important still: while no commentator has failed to observe that the EU is not (and should not be) a nation-state, almost every one has then proceeded to show that the Union should, in fact, provide what is conventionally expected of a proper nation-state.

If European intellectuals want to contribute anything useful to redefining Europe’s role in the world, they should quit playing the ‘identity game’.

Identity cannot be decreed from above.

The days when peasants would be turned into Frenchmen through national curricula and national service ended with the nineteenth century.

Moreover, whoever plays the identity game also has to join in with another pastime: the non-identity game, also sometimes referred to as the ‘enemy game’.

While Habermas talks about the identity-forming ‘power of sentiments’ which was on display in February, such sentiments are not only far too fleeting – they are also far too mixed up with anti-Americanism for their own good.

In any case, it would be hard to turn them into permanent policy guidelines.

Whichever way one looks at it, debates about European identity rely on a nineteenth century model of nation-building.

What Europe needs instead is a debate about the special nature of the political and economic instruments it has created – not least its ‘post-national’ modes of political coordination and its recipes for economic integration in the aftermath of devastating conflict.

Memory is indeed at stake here. But not in the way those with an ‘identity’fixation think.

The EU may offer up its experiences in political, economic and – not least perhaps – moral reconstruction after traumatic historical experiences.

This is where the avant-garde ‘core Europe’, which Habermas and Derrida are talking about, can actually make a contribution.

Otherwise, debates about European identity will remain exercises in navel (or core) gazing.

Jan-Werner Müller is a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a founder of the European College of Liberal Arts, Berlin.

He is the editor of Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge University Press, 2002).